With this scene I wanted to create a haven for a record lover – a comfortable place they could sit and revel in their music...

With the release of V-Ray 3.0 nearing ever closer, Paul Hatton checks out the impressive capabilities of the all-new Progressive Rendering inside V-Ray 3.0, showcasing the Beta version

Introduction

Ever since gaining access to the V-Ray 3.0 beta, I have been impressed by their Progressive Rendering Production rendering option. It's a new feature in 3.0 which allows you to render and see your image progressively appear before you. Now you might ask "Isn't that just the same as V-Ray RT?” In a way yes it is the same. It is built on the same path-tracing technology as V-Ray RT but this is a production renderer which is compatible with all of the V-Ray production features.

1. Set the renderer to V-Ray 3.0

It's important to note that this feature was only introduced to V-Ray 3.0, so if you have a version prior to that then you won't be able to make use of this feature – yet! However, you can of course head over to the V-Ray website where you can sign up for the beta version. In the render set-up dialogue, scroll down to assign renderer and set it to V-Ray 3.0.

We begin by making sure that the renderer is set to V-Ray 3.0 to ensure that the Progressive Rendering option is available to us

2. Set the image sampler to progressive

Now we need to activate the Progressive Rendering and we do that in the Image Sampler roll-out. When I first saw it there I thought it was a bit of a strange place to have it, but having thought about it, it does make sense. The Image Sampler is essentially a process that V-Ray goes through to sample your image and clean it up. You tell V-Ray how many subdivisions you want it to go up to and it just ticks along until it hits that number. So for a Progressive Rendering solution, we essentially set the max subdivisions to a very high number!

Here you can see the roll-out options you get once you have set the Image Sampler to Progressive. You will notice that it gives you a new customized roll-out with specific settings

3. Render mask

This step is not strictly only to do with Progressive Rendering but I thought it would be helpful to point out all the same. It is a new feature in V-Ray 3.0 as well, so again you may not have come across it yet. This essentially allows you to only render parts of the image based on a grayscale mask or on selected objects. I've been after this tool for a long time now so I'm really pleased it's now here! No more awkward usage of the marquee select region render tool. Now we can be much more accurate with our re-renders.

Here we have selected the foreground record and as you can see the rendering has picked out that object specifically